They promised £300 off your energy bill. It is £294 up.
They promised £300 OFF your energy bill by 2030. So far you're paying £294 MORE. Standing charges alone have doubled. Here's the scoreboard, straight from Ofgem.
9 figures, each with its official source.
Up 13% on the quarter, driven by wholesale gas. The typical bill was £1,277 in winter 2021/22 (NAO), bills remain ~£585 (46%) above pre-crisis. Note: from July 2026 Ofgem also cut its typical-use assumptions, so the new headline cap is quoted as £1,663; £1,862 is the like-for-like figure.
Promise (2024): cut bills by up to £300 by 2030. Receipt so far: two years in, the like-for-like typical bill is £294 HIGHER than at the election (£1,862 vs £1,568), it would need to fall ~£594 from here to meet the pledge. Fairness note: Ofgem attributes the July 2026 rise mainly to wholesale gas linked to the Middle East conflict, outside direct government control.
Roughly DOUBLE pre-crisis levels and paid even by households that use no energy. Standing charges are ~17% of a typical bill (down from a 21% peak); the transmission-network element jumped 65% in Q2 2026 to fund grid investment (HoC Library CBP-10339).
Eight support schemes cost ~£44bn, about two-thirds LESS than the original £139bn estimate, thanks to falling wholesale prices, and the NAO called them 'undoubtedly successful', with low fraud (0.7%). Even so, ~238,000 households fell into fuel poverty over 2022-23.
In H2 2025 UK non-domestic electricity (incl. taxes/levies) was the most expensive in the EU14+UK; domestic electricity was 4th highest (29.78p/kWh, 6.16p above the median). In fairness: UK domestic GAS was the cheapest in the EU14+UK (7.05p/kWh).
More than 3× the 200–225GW of clean capacity NESO says is needed by 2030: a key bottleneck for the clean-power mission and the bills pledge. Reform is under way: 283GW of projects are getting offers to 2035 and 'zombie' projects removed; next application window late 2026.
Decision (Jul 2024): restrict the payment to Pension Credit recipients, removing it from ~10m pensioners. Receipt: reversed within a year. From winter 2025/26 all pensioners with income ≤£35,000 are paid: 7.5m more than under the means test. The U-turn costs ~£1.25bn; the surviving means test saves only ~£450m/yr of the ~£1.4bn originally claimed.
Genuine, modest improvement: projected to fall to 2.36m (9.4%) in 2025 as home efficiency improves. But England's LILEE measure only counts low-income households in INEFFICIENT homes, the charity NEA put UK-wide fuel poverty at ~4.5m households, and the average shortfall is ~£379/household.
The £1bn scheme closed having reached about a THIRD of the ~300,000 homes expected at launch (HoC Library CBP-9889), a shortfall spanning both administrations. Counterpoint: the larger ECO4 obligation delivered 1.04m measures in 305,600 households by Q1 2026.